In the South Seas, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Chapter VI— Chiefs and Tapus

WE used to admire exceedingly the bland and gallant manners of the chief called Taipi-Kikino. An
elegant guest at table, skilled in the use of knife and fork, a brave figure when he shouldered a gun and started for
the woods after wild chickens, always serviceable, always ingratiating and gay, I would sometimes wonder where he found
his cheerfulness. He had enough to sober him, I thought, in his official budget. His expenses — for he was always seen
attired in virgin white — must have by far exceeded his income of six dollars in the year, or say two shillings a
month. And he was himself a man of no substance; his house the poorest in the village. It was currently supposed that
his elder brother, Kauanui, must have helped him out. But how comes it that the elder brother should succeed to the
family estate, and be a wealthy commoner, and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in Anaho? That the one
should be wealthy, and the other almost indigent is probably to be explained by some adoption; for comparatively few
children are brought up in the house or succeed to the estates of their natural begetters. That the one should be chief
instead of the other must be explained (in a very Irish fashion) on the ground that neither of them is a chief at
all.

Since the return and the wars of the French, many chiefs have been deposed, and many so-called chiefs appointed. We
have seen, in the same house, one such upstart drinking in the company of two such extruded island Bourbons, men, whose
word a few years ago was life and death, now sunk to be peasants like their neighbours. So when the French overthrew
hereditary tyrants, dubbed the commons of the Marquesas freeborn citizens of the republic, and endowed them with a vote
for a CONSEILLER-GENERAL at Tahiti, they probably conceived themselves upon the path to popularity; and so far from
that, they were revolting public sentiment. The deposition of the chiefs was perhaps sometimes needful; the appointment
of others may have been needful also; it was at least a delicate business. The Government of George II. exiled many
Highland magnates. It never occurred to them to manufacture substitutes; and if the French have been more bold, we have
yet to see with what success.

Our chief at Anaho was always called, he always called himself, Taipi-Kikino; and yet that was not his name, but
only the wand of his false position. As soon as he was appointed chief, his name — which signified, if I remember
exactly, PRINCE BORN AMONG FLOWERS— fell in abeyance, and he was dubbed instead by the expressive byword, Taipi-Kikino
— HIGHWATER MAN-OF-NO-ACCOUNT— or, Englishing more boldly, BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK— a witty and a wicked cut. A nickname in
Polynesia destroys almost the memory of the original name. To-day, if we were Polynesians, Gladstone would be no more
heard of. We should speak of and address our Nestor as the Grand Old Man, and it is so that himself would sign his
correspondence. Not the prevalence, then, but the significancy of the nickname is to be noted here. The new authority
began with small prestige. Taipi has now been some time in office; from all I saw he seemed a person very fit. He is
not the least unpopular, and yet his power is nothing. He is a chief to the French, and goes to breakfast with the
Resident; but for any practical end of chieftaincy a rag doll were equally efficient.

We had been but three days in Anaho when we received the visit of the chief of Hatiheu, a man of weight and fame,
late leader of a war upon the French, late prisoner in Tahiti, and the last eater of long-pig in Nuka-hiva. Not many
years have elapsed since he was seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man’s arm across his shoulder. ‘So does
Kooamua to his enemies!’ he roared to the passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh. And now behold this
gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French, paying us a morning visit in European clothes. He was the man
of the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute,
formidable, and with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone’s — only for the brownness of the skin, and the high-chief’s
tattooing, all one side and much of the other being of an even blue. Further acquaintance increased our opinion of his
sense. He viewed the CASCO in a manner then quite new to us, examining her lines and the running of the gear; to a
piece of knitting on which one of the party was engaged, he must have devoted ten minutes’ patient study; nor did he
desist before he had divined the principles; and he was interested even to excitement by a type-writer, which he
learned to work. When he departed he carried away with him a list of his family, with his own name printed by his own
hand at the bottom. I should add that he was plainly much of a humorist, and not a little of a humbug. He told us, for
instance, that he was a person of exact sobriety; such being the obligation of his high estate: the commons might be
sots, but the chief could not stoop so low. And not many days after he was to be observed in a state of smiling and
lop-sided imbecility, the CASCO ribbon upside down on his dishonoured hat.

But his business that morning in Anaho is what concerns us here. The devil-fish, it seems, were growing scarce upon
the reef; it was judged fit to interpose what we should call a close season; for that end, in Polynesia, a tapu
(vulgarly spelt ‘taboo’) has to be declared, and who was to declare it? Taipi might; he ought; it was a chief part of
his duty; but would any one regard the inhibition of a Beggar on Horse-back? He might plant palm branches: it did not
in the least follow that the spot was sacred. He might recite the spell: it was shrewdly supposed the spirits would not
hearken. And so the old, legitimate cannibal must ride over the mountains to do it for him; and the respectable
official in white clothes could but look on and envy. At about the same time, though in a different manner, Kooamua
established a forest law. It was observed the cocoa-palms were suffering, for the plucking of green nuts impoverishes
and at last endangers the tree. Now Kooamua could tapu the reef, which was public property, but he could not tapu other
people’s palms; and the expedient adopted was interesting. He tapu’d his own trees, and his example was imitated over
all Hatiheu and Anaho. I fear Taipi might have tapu’d all that he possessed and found none to follow him. So much for
the esteem in which the dignity of an appointed chief is held by others; a single circumstance will show what he thinks
of it himself. I never met one, but he took an early opportunity to explain his situation. True, he was only an
appointed chief when I beheld him; but somewhere else, perhaps upon some other isle, he was a chieftain by descent:
upon which ground, he asked me (so to say it) to excuse his mushroom honours.

It will be observed with surprise that both these tapus are for thoroughly sensible ends. With surprise, I say,
because the nature of that institution is much misunderstood in Europe. It is taken usually in the sense of a
meaningless or wanton prohibition, such as that which to-day prevents women in some countries from smoking, or
yesterday prevented any one in Scotland from taking a walk on Sunday. The error is no less natural than it is unjust.
The Polynesians have not been trained in the bracing, practical thought of ancient Rome; with them the idea of law has
not been disengaged from that of morals or propriety; so that tapu has to cover the whole field, and implies
indifferently that an act is criminal, immoral, against sound public policy, unbecoming or (as we say) ‘not in good
form.’ Many tapus were in consequence absurd enough, such as those which deleted words out of the language, and
particularly those which related to women. Tapu encircled women upon all hands. Many things were forbidden to men; to
women we may say that few were permitted. They must not sit on the paepae; they must not go up to it by the stair; they
must not eat pork; they must not approach a boat; they must not cook at a fire which any male had kindled. The other
day, after the roads were made, it was observed the women plunged along margin through the bush, and when they came to
a bridge waded through the water: roads and bridges were the work of men’s hands, and tapu for the foot of women. Even
a man’s saddle, if the man be native, is a thing no self-respecting lady dares to use. Thus on the Anaho side of the
island, only two white men, Mr. Regler and the gendarme, M. Aussel, possess saddles; and when a woman has a journey to
make she must borrow from one or other. It will be noticed that these prohibitions tend, most of them, to an increased
reserve between the sexes. Regard for female chastity is the usual excuse for these disabilities that men delight to
lay upon their wives and mothers. Here the regard is absent; and behold the women still bound hand and foot with
meaningless proprieties! The women themselves, who are survivors of the old regimen, admit that in those days life was
not worth living. And yet even then there were exceptions. There were female chiefs and (I am assured) priestesses
besides; nice customs curtseyed to great dames, and in the most sacred enclosure of a High Place, Father Simeon Delmar
was shown a stone, and told it was the throne of some well-descended lady. How exactly parallel is this with European
practice, when princesses were suffered to penetrate the strictest cloister, and women could rule over a land in which
they were denied the control of their own children.

But the tapu is more often the instrument of wise and needful restrictions. We have seen it as the organ of paternal
government. It serves besides to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing to enforce them, rights of private
property. Thus a man, weary of the coming and going of Marquesan visitors, tapus his door; and to this day you may see
the palm-branch signal, even as our great — grandfathers saw the peeled wand before a Highland inn. Or take another
case. Anaho is known as ‘the country without popoi.’ The word popoi serves in different islands to indicate the main
food of the people: thus, in Hawaii, it implies a preparation of taro; in the Marquesas, of breadfruit. And a Marquesan
does not readily conceive life possible without his favourite diet. A few years ago a drought killed the breadfruit
trees and the bananas in the district of Anaho; and from this calamity, and the open-handed customs of the island, a
singular state of things arose. Well — watered Hatiheu had escaped the drought; every householder of Anaho accordingly
crossed the pass, chose some one in Hatiheu, ‘gave him his name’ — an onerous gift, but one not to be rejected — and
from this improvised relative proceeded to draw his supplies, for all the world as though he had paid for them. Hence a
continued traffic on the road. Some stalwart fellow, in a loin-cloth, and glistening with sweat, may be seen at all
hours of the day, a stick across his bare shoulders, tripping nervously under a double burthen of green fruits. And on
the far side of the gap a dozen stone posts on the wayside in the shadow of a grove mark the breathing-space of the
popoi-carriers. A little back from the beach, and not half a mile from Anaho, I was the more amazed to find a cluster
of well-doing breadfruits heavy with their harvest. ‘Why do you not take these?’ I asked. ‘Tapu,’ said Hoka; and I
thought to myself (after the manner of dull travellers) what children and fools these people were to toil over the
mountain and despoil innocent neighbours when the staff of life was thus growing at their door. I was the more in
error. In the general destruction these surviving trees were enough only for the family of the proprietor, and by the
simple expedient of declaring a tapu he enforced his right.

The sanction of the tapu is superstitious; and the punishment of infraction either a wasting or a deadly sickness. A
slow disease follows on the eating of tapu fish, and can only be cured with the bones of the same fish burned with the
due mysteries. The cocoa — nut and breadfruit tapu works more swiftly. Suppose you have eaten tapu fruit at the evening
meal, at night your sleep will be uneasy; in the morning, swelling and a dark discoloration will have attacked your
neck, whence they spread upward to the face; and in two days, unless the cure be interjected, you must die. This cure
is prepared from the rubbed leaves of the tree from which the patient stole; so that he cannot be saved without
confessing to the Tahuku the person whom he wronged. In the experience of my informant, almost no tapu had been put in
use, except the two described: he had thus no opportunity to learn the nature and operation of the others; and, as the
art of making them was jealously guarded amongst the old men, he believed the mystery would soon die out. I should add
that he was no Marquesan, but a Chinaman, a resident in the group from boyhood, and a reverent believer in the spells
which he described. White men, amongst whom Ah Fu included himself, were exempt; but he had a tale of a Tahitian woman,
who had come to the Marquesas, eaten tapu fish, and, although uninformed of her offence and danger, had been afflicted
and cured exactly like a native.

Doubtless the belief is strong; doubtless, with this weakly and fanciful race, it is in many cases strong enough to
kill; it should be strong indeed in those who tapu their trees secretly, so that they may detect a depredator by his
sickness. Or, perhaps, we should understand the idea of the hidden tapu otherwise, as a politic device to spread
uneasiness and extort confessions: so that, when a man is ailing, he shall ransack his brain for any possible offence,
and send at once for any proprietor whose rights he has invaded. ‘Had you hidden a tapu?’ we may conceive him asking;
and I cannot imagine the proprietor gainsaying it; and this is perhaps the strangest feature of the system — that it
should be regarded from without with such a mental and implicit awe, and, when examined from within, should present so
many apparent evidences of design.

We read in Dr. Campbell’s POENAMO of a New Zealand girl, who was foolishly told that she had eaten a tapu yam, and
who instantly sickened, and died in the two days of simple terror. The period is the same as in the Marquesas;
doubtless the symptoms were so too. How singular to consider that a superstition of such sway is possibly a
manufactured article; and that, even if it were not originally invented, its details have plainly been arranged by the
authorities of some Polynesian Scotland Yard. Fitly enough, the belief is to-day — and was probably always — far from
universal. Hell at home is a strong deterrent with some; a passing thought with others; with others, again, a theme of
public mockery, not always well assured; and so in the Marquesas with the tapu. Mr. Regler has seen the two extremes of
scepticism and implicit fear. In the tapu grove he found one fellow stealing breadfruit, cheerful and impudent as a
street arab; and it was only on a menace of exposure that he showed himself the least discountenanced. The other case
was opposed in every point. Mr. Regler asked a native to accompany him upon a voyage; the man went gladly enough, but
suddenly perceiving a dead tapu fish in the bottom of the boat, leaped back with a scream; nor could the promise of a
dollar prevail upon him to advance.

The Marquesan, it will be observed, adheres to the old idea of the local circumscription of beliefs and duties. Not
only are the whites exempt from consequences; but their transgressions seem to be viewed without horror. It was Mr.
Regler who had killed the fish; yet the devout native was not shocked at Mr. Regler — only refused to join him in his
boat. A white is a white: the servant (so to speak) of other and more liberal gods; and not to be blamed if he profit
by his liberty. The Jews were perhaps the first to interrupt this ancient comity of faiths; and the Jewish virus is
still strong in Christianity. All the world must respect our tapus, or we gnash our teeth.